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So, is Web 3.0 going to be hectic dynamically tiled web design that looks like it belongs on TMZ and other gossip rags rather than respected news websites? There is such a thing as too much active content, you know

It depends upon how "active" you want it to be. RDF is mostly for the back-end anyway.

As a developer heavily involved in building RDF/RDFA utilities, I can't begin to express just how annoying it is to see a Slashdot header pointing to a "technical blog post" that has absolutely no mention of the technology used: nothing about the libraries or server platforms used; nothing about the trade-offs with client desktop vs mobile vs legacy (IE7 / FF3.x) vs. ARIA (accessibility). If you search through the article, you find a link to another article that says they use Silverlight (WTF!?) to handle their contentEditable stuff, Java as their RDFa store, and PHP as their deployment strategy. It looks like an overpriced, incoherent mess that's already headed for legacy status.

The BBC was one of the first websites to actually survive the Slashdot Effect (and report having done so), an achievement worthy of an award at the time. Their tech guys also invented the Dirac format (which they have yet to use for anything). The BBC multicasts at least some of their channels and provides the iPlayer for VoD-ing programs later (pity they don't support PPV for out-of-country, but it's a start).

As such, I'd say their tech guys have defined "forward" for the next decade for everyone else. It's good to see them continuing to experiment as well as adapt to the new medium. Research and development has pretty much died - where it ever existed - amongst many of the major television stations. Given their financial situation, I'm actually very impressed that they're putting money into technical innovation.

"They just tax everyone with a TV in the UK - even if you never watch their stuff."

They tax everyone who watches live broadcast TV in the UK.

Yes, whilst a fair whack goes to the BBC, it also goes to looking after the broadcast infrastructure in the UK also. you might have noticed recent talk about using surplus from the digital switchover fund which came from the BBC's pool of money being used to fund broadband too.

So enough of the bollocks about having to pay for something you don't use, you do use it, if you watch UK broadcast TV live, you're getting benefit from the license fee. If you don't watch broadcast TV live, you have no need to pay the license fee. Chances are even if you pay for Sky, or Virgin and solely use that, you've watched shows that are at least in part funded by the license fee.

People stupidly believe the FUD that the license fee only pays for the actual BBC channels, but it doesn't - it pays for the content they produce, that's shown elsewhere, the broadcast network, subsidies for ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, and also any number of projects related to media access in the UK.

The BBC are restricted in how well they can generate resources to compete- Sky gets more income than the BBC does from license fees, and whilst the BBC could compete, it's been artificially restricted from doing so at the behest of Murdoch due to his corrupt links with numerous high ranking government ministers.

BBC World was growing incredibly fast as a result of the quality and popularity of their content (i.e. Planet Earth), and the BBC was looking at producing set top boxes along with the likes of ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 for on demand TV well ahead of it's time (long before Apple TV, and Google TV etc.). These are examples of where, due to Sky/Virgin lobbying the BBC has been artificially held back. The worst part is, for people like you, who clearly detest the license fee, that it could've been reduced, or even abolished if the BBC was allowed to pursue these revenue streams. Effectively despite Sky receiving higher income than the BBC by quite a margin, the BBC was restricted because despite it's lower income, it was out competing Sky due to better innovating. Now, ministers have prevented it innovating, so that Sky could continue to make more money, without having to bother to innovate.

It's somewhat of a coup too, the BBC was established to be independent of government, but government does have some control over it's budget, and the Tories most recently have abused that to restrict the BBC's ability to outcompete the likes of Sky based on innovation. Both previously Labour and now the Tories know they can't use the BBC to push their agenda because it is at least editorially independent, so instead they use their control over it's budget to restrict it's ability to compete with Sky which, being controlled so heavily by Murdoch they can use to push their agenda - when you understand this context, you'll understand why Jeremy Hunt was so openly going to allow the full News International takeover of Sky despite the blatant evidence of corruption right until the point it became a truly untenable position to defend. He was willing to be so openly corrupt because he knew that if it succeeded that a couple of years Murdoch propaganda before the next election would make him and his party look like saints again regardless.

There's a reason Murdoch's press and it's biggest ally, The Daily Mail create this anti-BBC propaganda about how you're paying for Jonathan Ross' extortionate salary and so forth and harp on about how unfair the license fee is if you don't watch Eastenders ignoring everything else the license fee goes to in their articles. I have plenty of complaints about some areas of the BBC myself, but make no mistake it's still one of the best editorially independent news outlet in the world, still arguably the best producer of documentairies in the world, and most importantly - it's under attack by vested interests.

Agreed, and it now also pays for the World Service (which used to be paid via the Foreign Office), not to mention virtually all local and national radio, not to mention the BBC news service, all royalties owed due to people ordering content via iPlayer, their research division (the Olympics is due to be shown in Ultra-High Definition TV, something for which there is no meaningful off-the-shelf hardware to support, they're having to make it themselves), etc.

I'm afraid you've got bronze. Hognoxious [slashdot.org] and jginspace [slashdot.org] have the gold and silver, respectively. But don't worry, it's a very nice medal! With a swastika surrounded by the five Olympic rings, and everything! The National Spelling & Grammar Worker's Party has been honoured, and the cause of International Grammar Fascism advanced. We'll drive those dirty populist language reformers out of the Internet at any cost, and make them bleed red ink for disturbing our utopia of unambiguous syntax and inflection.

Flash had been around for over 5 years until it became the unofficial standard for rich internet applications (right around the time youtube showed up).

The idea behind the semantic web (context > statistics) is not a bad one, the biggest problem I see though is that everyone is trying to implement it using entirely new standards and with an utopic ideal. If they worked on how to get existing technologies to take advantage of all those ideas (for ex: altering SQL to accept the returning of relations inste

Let me put it another way (And picking up on the flash example). You used to need flash to insert videos into web pages, but now there is a "video" tag. My gripe is not with RDF or OWL themselves (even though the fact that you can't compute the entirety of OWL kind of strikes me as a bit stupid - why go all out to then say "but you can only use # = 1"), but with SPARQL. They could have just added SPARQL like features to SQL and you'd only use it if you wanted... SQL uses tables, but isn't a table a matrix a

Flash had been around for over 5 years until it became the unofficial standard for rich internet applications (right around the time youtube showed up).

Youtube has nothing to do with RIA BTW, Flash was just used for video playback. Flash never became the standard for RIA, because RIA didn't really take off until Javascript performance and browser standardization made AJAX viable.

Damn right. I just gave them some feedback (which you can too at http://ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=878133413 [ecustomeropinions.com]):
"Why does the new site use so little screen space? On a fairly standard monitor, less than half of my screen space is being used by content. The yellow/black theme is fine, but throwing blue into the mix is horrible! The shade of blue chosen is also almost identical to that used in Windows 7 to highlighted text.
There is also very little commonality in CSS - why are some sect

it's one of the few actively maintained sites that doesn't have advertising.

Not quite. It's the BBC, so they are not allowed to advertise. But... they do, all the time. They are just more devious about it. Sure, yes, there's no banners or sidebars with ads. But they will make sure they get team's sponsor's logos in their pics, they'll mention sponsors names where possible, etc. As well as the fact that sport is a big-business commercial product all by itself. You can absolutely guarantee a lot of corpora

For sure sports themselves have sponsors,and so if taking photos or videos of sports and sportsmen, any logos they are wearing will be in the picture. But to suggest that the BBC go out of their way to include such sponsorship, let alone ads, is the very opposite of the truth.

Take for example Snooker, which has always been heavily sponsored. The snooker page (as server in the UK) has no sign of any sponsors or ads, other than in a single photo where the logo is incidentally to be s

It feels exactly like MSN, which is not a compliment. There is an upper limit to the number of links I can read on a single page before it becomes a "where's Waldo" experience. At this point I usually go to a search engine.

If the sucess of Facebook and Google suggest anything, it's that clean interfaces are appealing to most people.

That would be meaningful, except that in this case the standards are 99.9% the same -except- that they're all in different namespaces, with the 0.1% difference not being in the use cases supported but in the nomenclature.

Unfortunately two-thirds of the pages are reserved for corporate sponsors and the public is required to enter a raffle to have to have the opportunity of viewing the remaining pages, most of which are concerned with lawn bowling and tiddlywinks.

Only VISA is accepted for page view payments.

Do not attempt to drink non-sponsoring beverages whilst viewing the pages.

Note to non-English-speakers: if you're going to write satire (or any prose) in English, try to avoid foreign idioms like "UKians" or "USians". No native English speaker ever uses that form, and it is like ruining a joke by stuttering on the punch line.